A Puppet Story...
Systems Building Systems

This is my second RubyConf

This is my second RubyConf

This is my second RubyConf
Use your powers for Awesome!

This is my second RubyConf
Use your powers for Awesome!

This is my second RubyConf
Use your powers for Awesome!

Developer Sysadmin

Three
people
Developer Sysadmin

Forgive him, for he
believes that the
customs of his
tribe are the laws
of nature!
--George Bernard Shaw

sudo chown -R us:us /your/base

What is Puppet?
Language Parser
Client/Server
Resource Abstraction
A few other things
All Ruby... : )

Love
You must love your
tools, if you don't, it
will show in the work
you do...
--Dave Thomas

Can you feel
the Spirit?

What is a sysadmin?

Not Exactly Modern

Luke
Kanies

One Goal:
Revolutionize
System
Administration

Say What?!??

Don’t look at me...
I wasn’t the last one to touch it...

Wisdom of the Clouds

You can either easily manage
complex systems at scale...

You can either easily manage
complex systems at scale...
Or you can’t...

Everything the Same
Everything Distinct

Luke
Kanies
Recovering Sysadmin

SSH Cfengine ?

Bad product,
hungry Luke

SSH Cfengine ?

SSH Cfengine ?

Who’s using Puppet?
“...at Google we're
currently using Puppet
to manage close to
6,000 Macs, and it's
likely our deployment
will expand
dramatically beyond
that....”

Competitive Advantage

People are finally figuring out
puppet and how it gets you
to the pub by 4pm. Note that
I've been at this pub since
2pm.
-- Jorge Castro

Enter Puppet...
Configuration Is
Declarative Code
Semantics Matter
Reproducible
Shareable
Maintainable
Extensible

An Analogy
Programming SysAdmin
Low-level, commands
Assembly
non-portable and files
Abstract,
C* Resources
portable
* For small values of
abstract

Portablity
23 package types
Users in NetInfo,
useradd, pw
Support for Debian,
Ubuntu, Red Hat,
Solaris, OS X,
Gentoo, SuSE,
FreeBSD, and more

Network Effects

Portable Resources
This:

Portable Resources
This:
Becomes:

Portable Resources
This:
Becomes:

Portable Resources
This:
Becomes:

Portable Resources
This:
Becomes:

Portable Resources
This:
Becomes:

Debian

Debian
Red Hat

Debian
Red Hat

Package

Configuration should
Package get modified after
package installation
Configuration

Configuration should
Package get modified after
package installation
Service should restart
Configuration when
configuration changes
Service

Perspectives

Idempotence...

Idempotence...

Idempotence...
Describes the property of operations in mathematics
and computer science which yield the same result after
the operations is applied multiple times.

?????

Community
Open Source
(Beer & Speech)

What’s on the Horizon?
Currents, Drift and Directions

Questions?
andrew@reductivelabs
twitter.com/littleidea